snark of the week

jim henley @ unqualified offerings:

the following appeared this week in the new york times, the washington post, slate and the new yorker in a parallel universe ... how i got it right: looking back at a time of justified opposition to a mad, violent enterprise so many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the iraq war when it had a chance of doing good that i have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation's elite media venues — collecting, i am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now. it's a lot of pressure, so please forgive anything glib or short you read herein: between articles, interviews, think-tank panels and presentations before government agencies and policy organs i'm not permitted to mention, i'm a little frazzled. on the bright side, and i can confirm that my experience has been similar to those of my fellow prophets, being the object of so much attention, being repeatedly quizzed by eager interlocutors on the same basic points, encourages one to distill one's thinking to its essence. as kenneth pollack asked me the other day, "what the fuck was so special about you, anyway?" "for one thing," i said, "i am not sprawled on a sidewalk next the mcpherson square metro station, hoping to cadge enough quarters to enjoy the rare treat of laundering the vomit out of the only shirt i own, praying all the while that decent people do not recognize me beneath the matted beard and tangled hair." "but my thigh hurts!" he said. "shut up," i consoled him, "or i'll kick it again." still he had a way of arriving at the essential question: "what the fuck was so special about me, anyway?" why did i have the sense to oppose the us conquest of iraq when so many of our great and good supported it? sometimes i think the other question is almost more interesting: what the fuck were those other people thinking? alas, answers to that one are hard to come by, since understandable shame has closed many mouths. so my own side of the story will have to suffice. why was i right and you, if you were a powerful politician or respected pundit in 2002-2003, wrong? some guesses follow. i'm really very bright. i don't like to brag, but my iq places me in the 99th percentile of americans. odds are, for instance, that i am smarter than you. and if i'm not, you're probably not that much smarter than i am. and even if you are, it would be unseemly for you to say so. what are you, stuck up or something? you aside, i'm certainly smarter than the president, or doug feith, or joe klein. i am seventeen times as smart as senator joseph lieberman. i am twenty-five hundred percent brighter than gop presidential candidate john mccain. my superior intelligence is a superficially plausible explanation, and i don't discount it, but two immediate objections suggest themselves. first, and less crucially, it simply raises another question: how did i get so smart in the first place? the shortest answer is, "because my parents were smart, and their parents were smart too." it's very hard to say why that matters: iq appears to be substantially heritable, but it's hard to disentangle the genetic component from the environmental nevertheless — i was reared by my parents, and not, as you know, by yours. if i'd been reared by yours i'd have gotten more toys as a kid. we were poor and you, somewhat spoiled. distressingly, there's no practical program for improvement there. "be smarter!" we might say to doug feith, "you'll make better policy!" but doug feith can't go back in time and be born to other people. but in light of the second objection to the "intelligence theory," that probably doesn't matter. second objection: you didn't have to be all that bright to oppose the iraq war in advance. heck, polls suggest that most americans were dubious about the idea until the war became obviously inevitable. real enthusiasm was confined to the elite media, the bipartisan defense-policy establishment and a bunch of republican quasi-intellectuals who had spent ten years casting about for different countries to have a war — any war — with. i mean, for crying out loud, at one point our rulers declared that saddam hussein might attack america with remote-controlled model planes. you didn't have to wait to bounce that one off the folks at your next mensa meeting to judge its likelihood. nor did you have to puzzle overlong, if someone tried to put that one by you, how much stock you should put in anything else that came out of their mouths. conclusion: my manifest intelligence was definitely not necessary to opposing the iraq war. it may not have been sufficient either. i wasn't born yesterday. i had heard of the middle east before september 12, 2001. i knew that many of the loudest advocates for war with iraq were so-called national-greatness conservatives who spent the 1990s arguing that war was good for the soul. i remembered elliott abrams and john poindexter and michael ledeen as the knaves and fools of iran-contra, and drew the appropriate conclusions about the bush administration wanting to employ them: it was an administration of knaves and fools. people will object that the project for a new american century had heard of the middle east before september 12, 2001 too, so just knowing some things wasn't enough. and hey, true, but if you read"warbloggers"back in 2001-2003, the thing that really jumped out was how new all this foreign-policy stuff was to them. people without much knowledge on the subject went looking for someone to soothe a very real hurt they felt in september 2001, and the first people they ran into were raving, nationalistic morons with a preexisting agenda, clustered around the wall street journal and the weekly standard. libertarianism. as a libertarian, i was primed to react skeptically to official pronouncements. "hayek doesn't stop at the water's edge!" i coined that one. not bad, huh? i could tell the difference between the government and the country. people who couldn't make this distinction could not rationally cope with the idea that american foreign policy was the largest driver of anti-american terrorism because it sounded to them too much like "the american people deserve to be victims of terrorism." i could see the self-interest of the officials pushing for war — how war would benefit their political party, their department within the government, enhance their own status at the expense of rivals. libertarianism made it clear how absurd the idealistic case was. supposedly, wise, firm and just american guidance would usher iraq into a new era of liberalism and comity. but none of that was going to work unless real american officials embedded in american political institutions were unusually selfless and astute, with a lofty and omniscient devotion to iraqi welfare. and, you know, they weren't going to be that. finally-er, being neither republican nor democrat meant that i wasn't unduly impressed when even tom friedman, or even some clinton administration hack, assured everyone that the tinpot ruler of a two-bit despotism eight-thousand miles away would and could destroy us if we didn't get him first. here there are a number of objections. all too many self-described libertarians supported the iraq war, with that noxious fervor for which we are notorious. these people were led astray by a combination of noble and base tendencies within libertarianism. saddam hussein was a vicious tyrant, after all, and some libertarians let a commendable hatred of tyrants overrule their common sense. some libertarians remembered that war involved guns, and lots of them, and figured it must be good. and many feared that if the united states did not go to war, it might make some hippie, somewhere, happy. the more telling objection is that you didn't have to be a libertarian to figure out that going to war with iraq made even less sense than driving home to east egg drunk off your ass and angry at your spouse. any number of leftists and garden-variety liberals, and even a handful of conservatives, figured it out, each for different reasons. this objection has the disadvantage of being obviously true. what all of us had in common is probably a simple recognition: war is a big deal. it isn't normal. it's not something to take up casually. any war you can describe as "a war of choice" is a crime. war feeds on and feeds the negative passions. it is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. various hawks occasionally protested that "of course" they didn't enjoy war, but they were almost always lying. anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time. it's a heavy burden, i'll admit. but the riches and fame make it all worthwhile.

quote of the day

born-again democrat john cole @ balloon juice:

my iraq war retrospective i see that andrew sullivan was asked to list what he got wrong about iraq for the five year anniversary of the invasion, and since i was as big a war booster as anyone, i thought i would list what i got wrong: everything. and i don’t say that to provide people with an easy way to beat up on me, but i do sort of have to face facts. i was wrong about everything. i was wrong about the doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. i was wrong about iraq possessing wmd. i was wrong about scott ritter and the inspections. i was wrong about the un involvement in weapons inspections. i was wrong about the containment sanctions. i was wrong about the broader impact of the war on the middle east. i was wrong about this making us more safe. i was wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize iraq. i was wrong when i stated this administration had a clear plan for the aftermath. i was wrong about securing the ammunition dumps. i was wrong about the ease of bringing democracy to the middle east. i was wrong about dissolving the iraqi army. i was wrong about the looting being unimportant. i was wrong that bush/cheney were competent. i was wrong that we would be greeted as liberators. i was wrong to make fun of the anti-war protestors. i was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies. i mean, i could go down the list and continue on, but you get the point. i was wrong about EVERY. GOD. DAMNED. THING. it is amazing i could tie my shoes in 2001-2004. if you took all the wrongness i generated, put it together and compacted it and processed it, there would be enough concentrated stupid to fuel three hundred years of weekly standard journals. i am not sure how i snapped out of it, but i think abu ghraib and the negative impact of the insurgency did sober me up a bit. war should always be an absolute last resort, not just another option. i will never make the same mistakes again.

america's most wanted

or maybe not.

president bush, september 17, 2001:

q: do you want bin laden dead? bush: i want justice. there's an old poster out west, as i recall, that said, "wanted: dead or alive." q: do you see this being long-term? you were saying it's long-term, do you see an end, at all? bush: i think that this is a long-term battle, war. there will be battles. but this is long-term. after all, our mission is not just osama bin laden, the al qaeda organization. our mission is to battle terrorism and to join with freedom loving people. we are putting together a coalition that is a coalition dedicated to declaring to the world we will do what it takes to find the terrorists, to rout them out and to hold them accountable. and the united states is proud to lead the coalition. q: are you saying you want him dead or alive, sir? can i interpret — bush: i just remember, all i'm doing is remembering when i was a kid i remember that they used to put out there in the old west, a wanted poster. it said: "wanted, dead or alive." all i want and america wants him brought to justice. that's what we want.

president bush, march 13, 2002:

q: but don't you believe that the threat that bin laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive? bush: well, as i say, we haven't heard much from him. and i wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. and, again, i don't know where he is. i — i'll repeat what i said. i truly am not that concerned about him. i know he is on the run. i was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. i was concerned about the fact that he was basically running afghanistan and calling the shots for the taliban.

president bush, september 5, 2006:

bin laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as lenin and hitler before them. the question is: will we listen? will we pay attention to what these evil men say? america and our coalition partners have made our choice. we're taking the words of the enemy seriously. we're on the offensive, and we will not rest, we will not retreat, and we will not withdraw from the fight, until this threat to civilization has been removed.

fred barnes, editor, the weekly standard, september 14, 2006:

host: alright fred, you and a few other journalists were in the oval office with the president, right? and he says catching osama bin laden is not job number one? barnes: well, he said, look, you can send 100,000 special forces, that’s the figure he used, to the mountains of pakistan and afghanistan and hunt him down, but he just said that’s not a top priority use of american resources. his vision of a war on terror is one that involves intelligence to find out from people, to get tips, to follow them up and break up plots to kill americans before they occur. that’s what happened recently in that case of the planes that were to be blown up by terrorists, we think coming from england, and that’s the top priority. he says, you know, getting osama bin laden is a low priority compared to that.

for whom the bills toll

"in truth i tell you, this very night, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times." — matthew 26:34

november 1967: in response to the growing demonstrations that culminated in the october peace march on the pentagon, president lyndon johnson launched a press blitz aimed at shoring up flagging support for the vietnam war. johnson relit "the light at the tunnel" and flew general william westmoreland, commander of u.s. forces in vietnam, to washington to personally assure the national press club that "we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view." johnson received a nearly 10-point bounce in the polls for his efforts, from 40% to 48%.

however, johnson's bounce in the polls was quickly turned into a dive by the startling tet offensive, launched by the north vietnamese at the start of february 1968, which demonstrated that they were far from their last throes. during the offensive american audiences were also treated to a brutal street execution and were introduced to the now-famous phrase "we had to destroy the village in order to save it", attributed by many to the destruction of the city of ben tre.

by february's end a turning point in the war of domestic public opinion had arrived, made explicit when cbs evening news anchor walter cronkite, considered by viewers, "the most trusted man in america" — even as late as 1995 — concluded that "it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of vietnam is to end in a stalemate." in turn, johnson reportedly concluded that "if i've lost walter cronkite, i've lost middle america." the "light at the end of the tunnel" had been rudely snuffed out in homes across america.

johnson's approval sank back down to 38% and approval for his handling of the war hit 26%. comprehending the hole he was in, on the last day of march he withdrew his bid for reelection.

♠
38 years later
♥

november 2005: nearly three years into the war, with support for the occupation and the president at its lowest ebb — a familiar 38% — george w. bush launched his public relations blitz, dubbed the "national strategy for victory in iraq". while the speeches may have earned him a modest bounce of 5 points, one could argue instead that it was the december 15 iraqi elections that gave america a glimpse of hope. but bush could not escape johnson's fate and his bounce too came crashing down in late february when the golden mosque in samarra was destroyed, dashing any hope that civil war could be averted.

by that time venerable walter cronkite, long retired but still active at the ripe age of 89, had already made his case for withdrawal in january:

"it's my belief that we should get out now," cronkite said in a meeting with reporters. ... the best time to have made a similar statement about iraq came after hurricane katrina, he said. "we had an opportunity to say to the world and iraqis after the hurricane disaster that mother nature has not treated us well and we find ourselves missing the amount of money it takes to help these poor people out of their homeless situation and rebuild some of our most important cities in the united states," he said. "therefore, we are going to have to bring our troops home."

but his pronouncement was no "cronkite moment": in fact the journalist had come out against the war at least as far back as december 2003:

kurtz: let's talk a little bit about your views. you were opposed, no question about it, to the war in iraq. why? cronkite: well, not so much the war in iraq, as the way we entered the war in iraq. without any support from our previous allies, or the united nations as a whole. it seemed to me that this was — this unilateralism is a very serious breach of diplomacy, of strategy.

having remained largely out of the public eye for twenty years, cronkite no longer holds the nation in the thrall he once enjoyed as television's preeminent newsman, despite the continued respect of the public and the absense of any clear heir. furthermore, his advanced age, his having "outed" himself as a "social liberal" and his having endorsed 2004 democratic presidential hopeful dennis "moonbeam" kucinich's proposal for a federal "department of peace" gave ruthless war boosters fodder that they could use to dismiss the news legend as a doddering "leftie" loon.

---

but there can be little doubt that america had reached a "cronkite moment", even if the man himself was unable to deliver it personally. no, today's proliferation of network and cable news options no longer affords a single voice that kind of power over the national conscience. but three noteworthy voices did chime that week in february when the golden mosque was destroyed — noteworthy because they all were vocal supporters of the invasion.

bill o'reilly, fox news host and the most watched personality on cable news, could certainly lay claim to an audience the size of cronkite's, but no one save o'reilly himself would lay claim to any of cronkite's gravitas. quite the opposite: o'reilly is a sanctimonious screeching cartoon. nevertheless, on february 21, the day before the bombing of the golden mosque, a flummoxed o'reilly proclaimed:

here is the essential problem in iraq. there are so many nuts in the country — so many crazies — that we can't control them. and i don't — we're never gonna be able to control them. so the only solution to this is to hand over everything to the iraqis as fast as humanly possible. because we just can't control these crazy people. this is all over the place. and that was the big mistake about america: they didn't — it was the crazy-people underestimation. we did not know how to deal with them — still don't. but they're just all over the place.

bill buckley, jr., called "the father of contemporary conservatism", founder of the national review, is known to the layperson as the longtime host of firing line, his public policy arena. buckley's real audience however is the washington beltway; the professional narcissists in the nation's capitol want to know what buckley thinks of them. two days after the bombing a morose buckley concluded:

one can't doubt that the american objective in iraq has failed. ... our mission has failed because iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 americans. ... different plans have to be made. and the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.

bill kristol, scion of a founder of neoconservatism and the founder of the weekly standard, is familiar to viewers as a regular commentator on the fox news circuit. as a founder and chairman of the project for the new american century (whose members had included neo-apostate francis fukuyama), the think tank behind much of bush's suicidal foreign policy, kristol is the rightful father of the iraq adventure. speaking on the weekend following the bombing, as would a step-parent to a brood of half-wits, a testy kristol complained:

kristol: there would not be civil war if zarqawi had not spent the last 2 1/2 years — had ex-saddamists with him, very skillfully going on the offensive slaughtering shia in karbala, now blowing up the mosque. wallace: they’re there. there are going to be more mosques to blow up. what do you do about the terrorists? kristol: kill them. defeat them. wallace: we’ve been trying. kristol: we’ve been trying, and our soldiers are doing terrifically, but we have not had a serious three-year effort to fight a war in iraq as opposed to laying the preconditions for getting out. connelly: i think that really begs the question then: what have we been doing over there for three-plus years? you say there hasn’t been a serious effort to rid that region of the terrorists. i just wonder what secretary rumsfeld would say in response to that or all the u.s. soldiers who have been over there all this time. kristol: secretary rumsfeld’s plan was to draw down to 30,000 troops at the end of major activities.

in less than a week, after civil war could no longer be denied, a popular champion of the war and a respected opinion leader publicly abandoned the mission and one of its key architects publicly disparaged its execution. the bills have tolled. the cock has crowed. despite his claims to disregard polls and pundits, there can be no doubt that george bush has heard the knell and the caw. sadly for those still destined to suffer the gravest mistake of his presidency, bush has yet to exhibit any of johnson's powers of comprehension and appears intent only on abandoning any reckoning or resolution to his ill-starred successors.